Liberandos

Ben Mabry, one half of the North Carolina folk duo Beta Radio, and producer Adam Lindquist met at Appalachian State University in 2001. Lindquist had a four-track Tascam tape recorder and was already making albums. Mabry ended up in a student film Lindquist was scoring, playing a character who cheated on a test and got away with it—a role Mabry found morally complicated. They lost touch, reconnected, and lost touch again. In 2023, Mabry moved back to Wilmington and they started sending each other tracks.

What came out the other side was unlike anything either of them had made before.

"It feels like these are FM transmissions from the future," Mabry says. "I don't know how to get a frequency modulated signal from the future, but it was just a feeling that something like that was happening."

The sound Liberandos is building sits at a strange intersection. Mabry has spent recent years shifting away from the folk music he'd been making with an interesting toward his early grunge interests and deeper into Indian Kirtan chant music. Lindquist has been deep in world music for some time: a Bulgarian women's television choir that stopped him cold when it surfaced in his algorithm, Qawwali music from the Middle East, and the field recordings of Sacred Harp singers—an old choral tradition, especially prevalent in the South, rooted in early Protestant hymns.

"It doesn't feel like it's anywhere that we know," Lindquist says. "It's a combination of all the places we know or don't know, or we've heard about or dreamed about. It becomes kind of something else."

That quality of arriving somewhere unmapped seems to be the whole point for Liberandos. Mabry references a linguistic concept called the prophetic present, a way of speaking about the future as though it's already past. Some of the group’s lyrics toy with the idea. "It's such a strange time on planet earth," he says. "And I guess it's always strange, but it's especially strange right now for me. And it seems as though something is emerging that there is no playbook for."

The more they followed where the music was pointing, the more it revealed. "Whenever we started writing these songs, immediately there were so many visuals," Mabry says. "The more we lean into this space, the more it's like this world is revealed. I almost feel like I have to document it as fast as I can sometimes." Lindquist describes the same creative force at work on his end: “It's like, ‘How do I stay in this space where things just come in and I receive them and then I put them out?’”

What makes Liberandos unusual beyond the sound itself is the deliberateness with which they're building everything around it. Lindquist references visuals and internet architecture and maps. “It took some time to realize what it was becoming. And then we found it and we were like, that's it,” he adds. “And then we started building a lot around it and not just music. We've built a lot of things around it. We have a lot of architecture and a lot of stuff around it that isn't just music.”

For Mabry, the difficulty of describing it is part of the point. "It feels like the more I try to say about it, the less there is to say," he admits. "I know that that's not very useful in this context." Lindquist reaches for the image of a hobby train set in a basement, of two guys building an entire world, not entirely sure where the line will end up. "Those guys that have trains in their basements?" he says. "This is our train. Who wants to come down and hang out?"

Another single or two are on the way. An album is on the horizon. A live show is being developed. Mabry is working on a suit, and light, he says, has a lot to do with the sound.

Whatever Liberandos is, it's becoming.

VISIT: Liberandos